


balance us serene

by Ravenesta



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Aggressive Introspection, Low Chaos (Dishonored), M/M, Ratman Actually Getting To Be A Dad, pre-Dishonored 2, probably frivolous use of void powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-06 06:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10327337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ravenesta/pseuds/Ravenesta
Summary: Corvo often takes solace in that which he cannot touch.





	

**Author's Note:**

> there arent enough thanks in the world for brend (@brendwell on tumblr) who a) dragged me into dishonored in the first place, and b) was lovely enough to beta this!!
> 
> for anyone who's interested in that kind of thing, the music that plays in the void towards the end is 'I Understood Something' by Dario Marianelli

_The fence we walked between the years_

_Did balance us serene_

_It was a place half in the sky where_

_In the green of leaf and promising of peach_

_We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky_

_If we could reach and touch, we said,_

_'Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead_

—

Emily sits on the edge of her bed and waits, her socked feet swinging just above the stone floor. She’ll grow soon, Corvo thinks; she’s eating her way through half of the palace kitchens at every meal and is outgrowing her shoes at an alarming rate. He wonders absently if she’ll have the legs of her bed raised so that she can still swing her feet.

The plush mattress dips easily with Corvo’s weight, bouncing them both and making Emily giggle until he settles behind her, legs curled underneath him. Her hair is a little wild and bed-tangled, and he takes his time working the knots out with the brush, tugging gently and smoothing a hand over her head when she hisses quietly in pain. She’s grown her hair out, the past couple of years, long enough that he can pull it into a loose braid that hangs down her back, fingers moving almost without thought. He remembers how difficult it had been to learn, though, moving clumsily through Jessamine’s dark hair, back in the years he remembers only as a thousand stolen moments frozen in the amber of flickering candles and fading sunlight. She had laughed softly as she’d guided him blindly through the motions, hands settling over his as slowly, but surely, he’d managed to tie the ribbon around the base of the braid.

 _“You’ll do this for little Emily, one day, Dearest,”_ she’d said so, so fondly, and Corvo had laughed into the crook of her neck. _“I can’t imagine her ever growing so big,”_ he’d said, because neither of them were truly willing to put voice to the fact that Emily would be an empress’s daughter, with servants and maids and tutors to bathe and clothe and teach her, to pull up her hair every morning and to take it out at night, and that Corvo would always be her Lord Protector, but never her father.

He pulls a band around Emily’s hair – they were odd little rubber things that Piero had used to hold together mechanisms in his miniature models in the bad old days, but Cecilia had shown him their use in holding longer hair back and he’d kept in the habit – and ties a bow over it with a thin purple ribbon.

—

“Most of my Marked have asked me for a boon of some sort,” the Outsider says, apropos of absolutely nothing. As usual, his face is devoid of expression, giving away nothing of his purpose in drawing Corvo into the Void tonight. He stands at Corvo’s side, hands clasped at the small of his back and staring at something out in the vast expanse that Corvo cannot see. He is unnaturally still; there’s something about breathing that people tend to take for granted until they spend time with someone who does not need to.

They are not at the tower, this time. The pavilion where he watched the light leave Jessamine’s eyes has long ceased to haunt him, replaced by lessons spent out on the steps in the afternoon sun, Callista’s halfhearted scolding and Emily’s laughter joining birdsong and the rhythmic thumping steps of soldiers on patrol.

He could not save Jessamine, and he thinks that this will always hurt him in the deep, hollow place she had once carved for herself in his chest, an ache he will feel with each beat of her Heart over his own. It is a peace he thinks he can make with himself, though, and the Void seems to concur.

Tonight they stand at the edge of different pavilion, or something like it, though Corvo cannot place the style of it or even the stone it is made out of. He leans against a great grey pillar and watches as pieces of the crumbling underside of it break off and begin to float away into the Void, carried by some unseen current that draws in debris from empires long destroyed and those yet to be built alike.

The silence grows persistent, and Corvo realizes that the Outsider isn’t going to elaborate.

“What more could I possibly ask of you?” he replies, quietly, honestly. His voice seems to echo in his ears, both muffled by an endless pulling and carried across by it. He thinks he might hear whalesong, a distant, mournful croon that shakes through his ribs, makes his throat ache.

The Outsider’s eyes narrow in some unreadable expression that might be confusion or displeasure, or some combination of the two, or nothing like that at all.

“Everyone wants something, my dear,” he says, and it’s _almost_ chiding, but there’s little weight to it.  

—

It was Samuel who had started it, he thinks, with the bone charm on the hat.

He’s not sure when it happened, though he thinks it must’ve been sometime in the sleepless frightened days between slitting Lady Boyle’s throat and watching the blood turn her white blouse red and broadcasting the Lord Regent’s demise to the city in his own voice, but at some point he had noted the little thing sewn onto Samuel’s thick wool hat.

It was really more of a shard than a charm, tiny and mostly obscured by the compass rose wrought crudely in metal around it, but Corvo still heard its song, sharp and metallic behind his eyes and in the roof of his mouth.

Samuel had looked out over the horizon at the breaking dawn, and when he reached up to brush a thumb over it, Corvo had felt the thing pulse.

“There’s a storm comin’ our way,” he’d said, with a hard sort of certainty, like he knew it as surely as the sea.

Corvo had nodded.

Samuel never asked about the Mark burned into his skin, and Corvo never asked about the charm on his hat.

—

“Power? Wealth? Fame?” The Outsider prompts, and he’s turned to look Corvo in the eyes now, something like a challenge written in the hard lines of his face.

Corvo is silent for a few moments, thinking. He sighs softly, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the Outsider and looking back upon the Void.

He’s dreamed of it, before.

He’d never tell a soul – though privately he suspects that the Outsider already knows – of the nights he’s spent wandering through a limitless nothing with no beginning and no goal in mind, just drifting. He gets it wrong, of course. A human’s mind cannot recreate an impossible dimension, even in a dream, and it is always smaller, darker, more peaceful, quiet.

The Void is not peaceful, and it is not quiet. He still takes solace in it, when he is allowed to come.

“Money and power, I have more than I know what to do with,” he begins abruptly, although the Outsider doesn’t seem to mind. “And if that weren’t enough,” he continues, somewhat wryly, because he knows it will make the Outsider smile, “coups are easy enough to arrange.” This achieves the expected grin, a small, wicked thing that barely twitches the Outsider’s lips but makes his eyes light up like the reflection of a match in a tar pit.

“And fame…” he trails off, lost in thought. He remembers the paranoia and shame of his infamy during his outlaw days – and how quickly it had turned to heroism, how he was hailed as a destroyer of corruption who had returned the rightful empress to the throne. He feels his mouth twist into a scowl. At last, and with a firm finality, he says, “I’m not much interested in fame.”

—

Callista’s rune is a monster that sleeps under her bed.

Corvo might never have known about it if not for the Heart, pulsing softly and arrhythmically against his chest, and he’d turned his head around the room distractedly, like a dog that had caught a scent but had only half a mind to follow it. As Emily’s governess, her room was only down the hall from Emily and Corvo’s adjacent quarters. Corvo had trailed the bone’s song to her door but never stepped inside, instead had clenched his fist until the Mark burned hot and let the light that was no colour he could name flood his vision.

He’d spotted the rune tucked firmly into a slit in her mattress, humming contentedly away.

It’s no shrine, but then, Callista is no worshipper.

There’s an odd, solemn sort of accord between the two of them, an acknowledgement of their shared experiences with the Loyalists, the knowledge that what they have done, they have done _for Emily._

Callista’s respect is a strong thing, and it travels far. The Outsider played his role in their time spent at the Hound Pits, and in return, she keeps his mark close when she rests.

She told Corvo once, idly, that she’s slept much easier since coming to live in the Tower.

—

“No, perhaps not,” the Outsider agrees. “But there are other things you might ask of me.”  
  
“Such as?” Corvo prompts, knowing he’ll likely regret it once he hears the answer.

The Outsider does not breathe, but he can sigh, and he does it now, a gentle huff as he takes a step off of the edge of the stone pavilion, and continues to walk outwards onto nothing. “Perhaps,” the Outsider begins lightly, like a dagger sheathed in velvet, “...a life snuffed out too soon?”

Corvo’s breath leaves him in a sharp hiss, and he forces from between clenched teeth, “You’ve already given me what you could of her.”

The Outsider looks at him with something akin to surprise. “You’re right. It would be… unwise, to ask for more. Most would anyways.”

Corvo just shakes his head mutely, eyes downturned. Jessamine is dead, but sometimes, in the moments before he falls asleep, her echo will call him _Dearest._ To even think of, to hope for _more,_ feels perverse, somehow. _Wrong._ That way lies madness, and true witchcraft, and a darkness and grief he might never pull himself from no matter how much Emily cries for him.

He sits so that his feet are hanging off of the edge, and leans back on his palms. After some time, the Outsider joins him, one leg pulled up to his chest and close enough that their shoulders brush. The whalesong is louder, now. He can taste it when he runs his tongue along the ridges of his teeth.

Some indeterminate distance away, a shipwreck is still sailing, a thousand pieces floating in tandem as a ghost of the boat it once was, and a shattered figurehead wrapped in a ragged sail leading the way.

There are words for what he’s trying to say, there must be, and he struggles for them. “What you’ve given me…” he lays his left hand flat on his thigh, studies the Mark, tries to ignore the burning feeling of the Outsider’s eyes watching it just as closely. “What you’ve given me,” he begins again, “is a means to an end. There’s nothing I could ask you for that I couldn’t achieve in some way on my own – with these. Anything further than that is… too much. So far outside what is real that it wouldn’t be right." 

—

He and Emily sit next to each other on the edge of the bed as they pull on their boots, and the weight of Corvo dipping the mattress is almost enough to send her sliding forwards and onto the floor. She’s elected to wear her favourite winter boots, light brown and coming up to her mid-calf, lined on the inside with soft furs that she likes to wiggle her toes in. Corvo is, as ever, wearing boots that are just this side of too worn through and are probably permanently infused with dirt from every street and sewer in Dunwall. They’ve given at least one of the Tower’s servants a small heart attack, and have earned him a nod of respect from a few of the older watchmen.

After Emily’s boots come her gloves, a fine black leather pair that will, with time, come to fit her like a second skin. They’d been Corvo’s birthday gift to her earlier this year, and she’s hardly taken them off since. She’d told him they made her feel graceful – like her mother.

Finally, he helps her to shrug on her coat. Emily’s winter coat is almost brand new, and tailored specifically to her design. Corvo should know; he bore the brunt of the royal tailor’s complaints about it, as well as the ramblings about the beauty of the design, when he came to pick Emily up from her appointments with the man. These tailor types tended to be just as bad as the natural philosophers, when it came down to it.

It’s not _quite_ a carbon copy of his old Lord Protector’s coat – something about the way the collar frames her neck, the way it sits snugly on her shoulders –  but it’s a close thing, heavy wool dyed a deep blue, lined with burnished gold buttons and ornate designs embroidered into the cuffs.

It’s fit for an empress, and it suits her, in a way that makes Corvo’s chest ache. She’s always taken after Jessamine in looks, but wearing that coat, he can look at her and almost, _almost_ , see–

(The days that an empress has to herself are few and far between, and Emily likes to spend hers on Samuel’s trawler, when he happens to be in Dunwall. She runs immediately to the front of the ship, leaning as far over the railings as she dares, with the collar of her coat pulled up around her cheeks against the frigid sea air. Samuel turns to Corvo, says with a grin, “She has your eyes, don’t know how I never saw it ‘fore now.”)

The coat is double-breasted and the buttons are finicky little things that Emily often struggles with. Corvo half-crouches and does them up for her, pausing at the clasp on the fold of fabric over her heart.

Nobody would ever dare to call it what it is, least of all the Abbey. There has scarce been an Empress so loved by the people as Emily is right now, and to accuse her of heresy would be political suicide at best. Besides, the bone is carved ornately and framed by twists of silver, easy to pass off as ivory or some gift or heirloom, if it’s ever questioned.

Corvo will forever wonder when and how she managed to steal it from him, and then how she managed to have it worked into the design for her coat without his knowing, but, well. She _is_ his daughter, after all.

She smiles up at him, still a little sleepily, and takes his hand in hers to pull him out onto the balcony.

She wraps her arms around his neck when he hooks an arm under her knees and another around her back, lifting her up with ease. He does a cursory sweep of the courtyard below, but this early in the morning, nobody is looking in their direction. He turns his attentions to the roof above, settles his gaze on the highest surface he can see, and _Blinks._

—

“You never fail to surprise, my dear.” Corvo would hesitate to call the Outsider’s voice _fond,_ but there’s a warm inflection that tinges his words, of the same kind that had seeped into his tone from some time ago, _you fascinate me,_ he had said, and there’s something that makes Corvo’s heart quicken with the praise. “You decide on a goal, lock onto it with single minded focus, and use whatever is at your disposal to achieve it. But tell me, Corvo: Emily’s throne is recovered, the plague has been cured, your city is at peace… so what, oh, _what_ is your goal now?”

The question doesn’t seem to be goading, this time. In fact, there’s a genuine curiosity in it that surprises Corvo.

The Void is not quiet. It is not peaceful. It often hurts to look at, a frightening convulsing mass which expands outwards forever, the beginning and end of all things, encompassing the bones of emperors that existed a thousand years before he was born, and cities that will be built on his own bones, somewhere, sometime. Mortal men were not meant to look upon this place, but Corvo finds himself staring. Somewhere, both close by and very far away, he thinks he hears music, and strains his ears to catch it.

He looks up to find the Outsider already staring at him.

He answers as frankly as he can. “Keep her safe.” _Emily_ . “Keep them safe.” _Samuel, Callista, Sokolov, Piero, everyone else._ There is a sudden desperation, an urgent alarm in his mind, and he thinks, he _thinks,_ that if there is one thing the Outsider will give him, it must be this. _“Please.”_

The Outsider flicks his wrist, a street magician’s maneuver, and then there is a bone charm in his palm. He studies its familiar twists, rolls it between his fingers, holds it up for Corvo’s inspection. Emily’s clasp. Another flick of his wrist, and it’s gone. “That which you would ask of me, my dear, I find that I have already given.”

—

Sitting at his side and in no fear of falling, Emily takes his left hand in hers and pulls off the wrappings that cover the Mark. He doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing, beating down the instinct to look around for Overseers and suspicious eyes that could bring his world crashing down around him. There’s nobody up here but Emily.

She traces it with featherlight touches, fingertips barely grazing his skin. “How does it work?”

He thinks he might’ve told her this before, but there’s little harm in explaining it again. He’s never seen the reason in keeping secrets from her, least of all about this.

“The Mark connects me to the Void. When I use it, I pull energy out of the Void and bend it to my will.” He _thinks_ that’s how it works, anyways. He’s going off of bits and pieces he’s read, scraps of notes from Sokolov, and cryptic statements from the Outsider, because he’ll probably throw himself to the whales before he asks the god himself directly.

Emily nods, but is only quiet for a few moments more. “What’s the Void like?”

Corvo sighs heavily, and looks up to the sky. “It’s–” _Everything. Nothing. Too much._

It’s like sitting on a roof just after dawn, watching a sky that is not blue and is not grey, that is dark and bright all at once, that makes Corvo’s eyes sting, makes him feel like he’s going snowblind just to see the sunlight fighting against a great roiling blanket of Dunwall’s typical stormclouds that bruise the horizon in darker shades of the not-blue-grey. It should be terrifying. It _is_ terrifying.

“It’s… a little like being at sea, I suppose.” He pulls his hand away from her and wraps his arm around her shoulders, smiling when she immediately tucks herself against his side. He points her to their left, to where they can see the Wrenhaven spilling out into the ocean, skiffs and trawlers scattered in the calm waters. “Look,” he instructs, nodding towards the horizon. “When you’re out there, it feels like there’s nothing but water and sky forever – like nothing else exists, and it’s frightening, because it feels like you don’t know where you are, or if you can ever find your way home. Except, if you look around, things start to appear over the horizon, other boats and lands off in the distance. It’s not half so lonely as you think.”

Emily twists her neck to look up at him. “Are there whales?”  
  
He sighs and shakes his head, more fond than exasperated. “Yes, quite a few.” They followed the same invisible currents as everything else in the Void, but somehow always seemed to gravitate towards the Outsider, and had a tendency to float by just in time to give him a heart attack.

“And the Outsider too?”

“The Outsider too.”

—

The music is louder now.

He can’t quite tell where it’s coming from; it sounds like listening to an audiograph that’s playing in another room, like treading silently across the roof of a concert hall and hearing the instruments playing within. The tune is easy and _almost_ familiar, maybe something he heard when he was very young. Melancholic, and soft. A smile crosses his face as an odd idea comes to mind.

He turns to the Outsider. “There is one more thing I would ask of you.”  
  
The Outsider perks, head tilted in obvious curiosity. “Oh?”  
  
Corvo pushes himself to his feet, and holds his Marked hand out to the Outsider, palm up. “Dance with me?”

It would be dishonest to call the look on the Outsider’s face a smile; it would be an insult to actual smiles. There’s too much uncertainty in it, like he thinks he’s supposed to be genuinely pleased and isn’t used to the feeling at all, isn’t sure how to express it. It makes Corvo want to crow out in laughter, satisfaction at genuinely throwing off the god, for once.

The Outsider takes Corvo’s hand, and pulls himself to his feet.

It’s strange to think of the Outsider as anything resembling flesh and blood, but he is there and unnervingly _solid_ when he steps into Corvo’s space, looking _up_ at him because Corvo always manages to forget that without the advantage of ethereal floating abilities the Outsider is shorter than him.

In four millennia of toying with mortals, the Outsider has danced, of course, he must have, and he seems to fall into the position and the steps with the same languid ease with which he approaches everything, one hand resting on Corvo’s shoulder while the other is extended, fingers twining with Corvo’s own. Corvo’s hand settles on the Outsider’s waist, and he finds himself leading the dance, steps that had been drilled into his feet back when he was still young, and the Outsider follows him without complaint.

Truth be told, while Corvo had never enjoyed the balls and parties of high society, the scrutiny of his choice of dress, his expressions, his wordings, his dance partners, he had a private affection for dancing in itself. There’s a rhythm to the thing, _left foot, right foot, forward and back and forward and back,_ which has echoes of his formal sword training, stances and positions which were entirely impractical but still managed to turn a duel into a beautiful sort of thing.

They cross the pavilion in sweeping arcs in time with the music.

The dance has pushed them close enough together that Corvo cannot quite see the Outsider’s face, but he can hear the sly smile in his voice when he says, “I had wondered if you might find a dance partner at the Boyle party.”  
  
“The Boyle party wasn’t much of an occasion for dancing,” he counters. He’s not sure what prompts him to keep going, but he does, confessing in something of an embarrassed rush, “I had wondered if _you_ would. You would’ve made the whole ordeal much less tiresome.”

The music swells, and Corvo finds that the Outsider has moved close enough to rest his head on Corvo’s shoulder, soft hair tickling his ear. It’s not for a few moments that the distraction clears enough for him to realize that their most recent turn has sent them off the edge of the pavilion entirely, into the empty space beyond it. Oddly, Corvo finds that this does not send him into a blind panic. He looks down and sees his feet touching nothing but air, and thinks of being stranded in an endless ocean with no destination on the horizon. The Outsider’s cool fingers squeeze his and suddenly every point of contact is an anchor. Void, when had Corvo come to trust him that much?  
  
“I had considered accompanying you to the Boyle Estate, that evening,” the Outsider says into Corvo’s shoulder. “Though I confess, I find this outcome to be far more preferable.”  
  
Corvo nods and hums in agreement, and there must be something in his voice that gives him away, because the Outsider pulls away from him, still standing just close enough to keep his hands resting on him, for their chests to be almost brushing, but far enough away that he can look Corvo in the eyes, expression inscrutable.

“You have dreamed of this place,” he says flatly, and it’s not a question, confirming Corvo’s earlier thoughts.

“I– Yes. I have.”

“You… take comfort in it.” And now it _is_ a question, the Outsider’s face twisting in confusion.

“I suppose I do.” He doesn’t quite say that the Void is kinder than most of his other dreams, but he thinks that the Outsider might hear the admission regardless. The God sighs, bringing their joined hands closer, holding up Corvo’s hand for inspection. “What do you want, my dear,” he asks, and sounds almost _tired_ with it.

_I don’t know._

_You._

“This.” Sitting on the edge of some long-forgotten structure and looking out into nothing. Watching shipwrecks float by. Listening for the whales. Dancing to not-quite-remembered music. Replacing the nightmares and insomnia and terror with the Void, and the Outsider, and _this._

The Mark _burns_ brilliantly when the Outsider’s lips brush against it, touch light and barely-there. He feels them curl into a grin against the skin of his hand. “That, Dearest, can be arranged.”

—

“Will you go to the Void when you die?” Emily doesn’t sound… _upset,_ just plainly curious in that odd little way she has of asking about these things, and Corvo’s heart hurts with the thought that she’s too young to be thinking about death so blithely, but after Jessamine and the plague and _everything…_

“Perhaps.” He honestly isn’t sure, and he’s reluctant to ask.

“Aren’t you afraid?”  
  
_Yes._

_No._

Corvo smiles. “Not so much, anymore.”

—

_We ached and almost touched that stuff;_

_Our reach was never quite enough._

_If only we had taller been_

_And touched God's cuff, His hem,_

_We would not have to go with them_

_Who've gone before,_

_Who, short as us, stood as they could stand_

_And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land_

_Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul._

 

**Author's Note:**

> **if only we had taller been - ray bradbury**
> 
>  
> 
> find me on my tumblr @subcorax, if you like


End file.
